Apple has tried to equip its Photos app with all competitive features to make your photo editing experience seamless. Now you can extend the functionality of Photos app on Mac, as it is supported with multiple plug-ins to add some amazing features to your favorite app. It allows you to expand Photos app functionality with third-party software extensions.

Enable Extensions on Photos app: To enable plugin or extension, first, you need to run the standalone app to authorize it for use within the Mac OS X, which is a standard security requirement. However, you can instantly quit it. To set plugin within Photos, open System Preferences > tap the Extensions icon and then the Photos heading at the left. Now put a tick next to new extension. Now a new extension will appear when you tap on the Extensions heading while editing a photo.

7 Best Photos Extensions for Mac users

Noise Reducer Pro

Noise Reducer Pro is an effective tool that helps you de-noise your photos while you-re previewing it. It is added as a Mac photo editor extension for Photos app on Mac. It works on smart noise reduction techniques to remove all grainy appearance from your photos. It offers real-time comparison where it displays difference between the original and de-noised image in real-time. It works as a zero-click noise fixer for quick and effective results. It offers Auto-Mode feature where it de-Noise your images seamlessly.

Source: systweak

BeFunky Express

BeFunky Express is tailor made to fit into Photos app requirements. It gives seamless photo editing experience to users. Using this tool, you can Auto fix various issues with your photo to enhance quality of any photo with amazing results. It offers skin smoothing features where you can smooth away blemishes and imperfections without losing its natural beauty and texture of skin. It allows you to adjust shadows and highlights instantly to create a beautiful and perfect photo. Using this tool, you can liven up landscape, create amazing selfies, fix family photos and do much more.

Source: macworld

Pixelmator

Using Pixelmator extension, you can retouch images with powerful tools right inside the Photos app. It also allows you to reshape photos with Metal-based Pixelmator Distort tools. It is exclusively designed for Mac, where it uses macOS technologies and features such as OpenCL, OpenGL, Cocoa, FaceTime Camera, Grand Central Dispatch, Core Image and much more. You can use this tool to store files in iCloud, and share or save them on the web. It offers compatibility with Photos app where it open and saves photos using PDF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PSD and other popular formats.

Source: iTunes

FX Photo Studio

FX Photo Studio offers all intuitive features on Mac in the form of extension. It offers numerous filters, frames, effects, cropping tools and adjustments tools to make your photo editing experience fun. It offers one interesting feature in the form of masking ability where it allows you to paint over certain parts of the photo in order to apply changes or effects only to selected area. Using this tool, you can even add frames to highlight the style of your creation. You can set creative text labels or enhance images quality with set of editing tools.

Source: macworld

External Editors

Using this tool, you can edit all your images right into Photos app with supported extensions. It allows you to import files into the Photos app. You can use this tool to paste images in the clipboard or even drag a new photo from a Finder window on top of Photos app. It automatically saves your original image so that you can revert to original image anytime. The extension also supports to convert images into JPEG or RAW image format.

Source: iTunes

Affinity Photo

This tool take full advantage of latest Mac OS X technologies and it is fully optimized for 64-bit and multicore processors. It offers massive collection of effect including distortion, blur, shadows, tilt-shift, glows, lighting and much more. It offers huge library of drawing, painting, textures and professional DAUB brushes. It offers various quality retouching and correction tools for instant and effective results. This tool helps you redefine boundaries for professional photo editing apps.

Conclusion

Using extensions for photo editing work can help you ease your work effortlessly. You can use above mentioned extensions for easy photo editing work. Most of these extensions are primarily designed for built-in Photos app on Mac thus you can expect some good results using these plugins.

Author Bio:Apoorv Bhatnagar is working at Systweak Software, as an SEO analyst and technical Content Writer. His potential of writing is PC tips, Android and Mac tricks and he is anxious in writing other technical blogs. You can also find Apoorv on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Initially considered as an Apple developer hack, extensions became a useful and standard way to provide a modular operating system to users. These extensions are small pieces of code which are used to extend the system’s functionality. Many important system services including USB and FireWire support are optional components implemented as extensions.

In Mac systems, Safari browser offers users a wide range of extensions to customize their Internet experience. It also allows optional third party browser extensions to be installed on your system to perform various tasks like social sharing, note taking, interface with different apps like 1password etc. These extensions are considered to be useful and nifty tools but sometimes they also create problems to browse normally. Certain outdated and obsolete extensions need to be excluded from the list to enhance the browsing experience. Let’s discuss a method to remove Safari Extension on a Mac from your Safari browser.

Removing Safari Extensions on a Mac?

To do this follow these steps:

Open the Safari app in your system and go to “Safari” menu and select “Preferences”.

Click on “Extensions” tab, it will open the list of all extensions installed on Safari.

Select the extension you no longer want in Safari and click on “Uninstall”.

Confirm the removal in the pop-up window to remove that extension.

Follow the same method to remove other unwanted extensions on Safari.

Try deleting Safari Extension manually on your Mac: Above mentioned method is the most useful way to remove Safari extensions. Alternatively, you can try manually intervening from the file system to delete extensions from Safari. This step is useful when extensions in Safari are causing the problem to it and Extensions manager is not able to work properly. This situation is rare but it can happen when certain errant or incompatible extension refuses to remove itself. To remove these errant extensions, you need to go to where Safari extensions are located in Mac operating system. To do this follow these steps:

First Quit Safari on your Mac.

From the Finder on your system, press Command + Shift + G to open “Go to” folder (also accessible from the Go menu) and enter the following path “

~/Library/Safari/Extensions/” and hit “Go”.

Instantly you will be in the Safari Extensions folder on your Mac, remove any extension you want from Safari on your Mac.

Re-launch Safari when finished.

Remove Safari Plug-ins: Safari Plug-ins are different from Safari Extensions. Safari Plug-ins include better functionality and tend to be feature-rich media viewers like QuickTime, Adobe Acrobat reader in Safari etc. You can enter following paths to locate Safari Plug-ins.

For system level Safari plug-ins location (available for all users)

/Library/Internet Plug-ins/

For user level Safari Plug-ins location (available only for current users) ~/Library/Internet Plug-ins/

Most of the times you don’t require Safari extensions or third-party Plug-ins as simpler Safari installation can deal with any difficulty with the browser on the Mac. If you have updated system software and removed cache and still facing problems like Safari crashes, then you should consider checking Safari extensions. It happens more often when some extensions or plug-ins have not been updated yet to be compatible with the latest version.

Summary: Safari extensions are a useful addition to the browser to perform numerous tasks. Though certain obsolete and unnecessary extensions become a problem for the browser. In this article, we can discuss the ways to remove Safari Extensions on your Mac.

About Author:

Yogesh Sharma is working as an SEO personnel and technical content writer for Systweak. He likes to talk about various threats to cybersecurity and cybercrime awareness in his blogs.

Mi has entered the laptops markets with their new Mi Notebook Air released in to the market recently. The company that has been copying the business to design strategies of Apple Inc. is growing faster with new class of products into the market.

The Mi Notebook Air runs on Windows 10 and is 11% smaller and 13% thinner than the Apple MacBook Air. This light weight notebook is available with the different office document folders made with different materials. If you remember the launch of first MacBook Air by Steve Jobs of Apple, you would realize how Mi copied the same presentation to the audience.

Apart from the company’s copied strategies, the Mi Notebook Air looks so thin and beautifully crafted. It comes in whole metal body tested against the floor drops and other undergone resistance tests.

The notebooks are available in two variants, 12.5 inch screen version has the thickness of 12.9mm and weighs 1.07Kg. Though it is thinner than the Apple MacBook Air 13.1mm thickness it still weighs more than it. This version comes with the Intel Core M3 processor, 4GB RAM and 128GB SATA SSD along with the SSD slot. The battery is claimed to stand 11.5 hours on one complete charge.

The 13 inch version on the other hand is the higher-end version of the Mi Notebook Air series laptop with little bigger screen and better processing capability. It has 14.8mm thickness overall and weighs 1.28Kg. This version has the sixth generation Intel Core i5 processor coupled with Nvidia GeForce 940MX GPU with 1GB GDDR5 VRAM, 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. Xiaomi claims the 9.5 hour battery life on one single charge.

The screen is edge-to-edge glass protected and have thinner bezel than the MacBook Air. Both the laptops have the individual backlit keyboards, AKG dual speakers with Dolby digital surround output sound. They are available in two color variants, silver and gold. The prices varies for both the light and high-end versions as CNY3499 (appx. $530) (appx. Rs.36,000 INR) and CNY4999 (appx. $750) (appx. Rs.50,000) respectively.

If you are not aware of the Mac OSX and wanted a thin laptop with Windows 10 operating system, Mi Notebook Air can be your Apple MacBook Air with Windows 10 environment.

What do you think? Aren’t the Mi Notebook’s cool enough? Share you thoughts in comments below.

Final Cut Pro is one of the best preferred video editing software for Mac users. The animations, transitions and the plugins that are available for this software helps us make professional videos with best of class effects.

The solution that I am sharing with you today is what I have faced recently on my new Mac running on OSX El Captain v10.11.5. I’ve tried many advanced tricks but a simple trick at last saved my day. So, I thought this simple trick could come to use for you and it is as shared below.

Step 1: Close the running final Cut Pro application and make sure it isn’t running in the background.

Step 3: Go to Finder > ~/Movies directory. You will find several folders in there. Go to each folder and remove the broken plugins if you found any.

Step 4: Now uninstall the application by moving it to the trash

Step 5: Reinstall it again

Step 6: Open the app now. If it still shows the same ‘Final Cut Pro Quit Unexpectedly’ error, press and hold ALT+COMMAND keys while opening the application (Run Final Cut Pro from Applications folder this time instead of from launcher).

Holding ALT+COMMAND while running the application will ask you to reset the preferences for Final Cut Pro X 10.2.1. Choose to Reset. Then your application runs without closing.

Tip #1: On iTunes

The iTunes may get bloated with all the media files. As the size increases with more and more of media and music, so also is a decrease in the responsiveness of the iTunes. This results in a slow iTunes library and the option is the building of a second library. The second library will be used for the archiving the media and the music files.

There is no direct method of swapping media from one library to another. A play list is created of all the moveable items and these are then dragged and dropped into the folder on the desktop. We open the new library that was created and then all these files are dropped on iTunes. Later, we make it sure that all these items in the original library are deleted. The performance improves with the archival of these less-used files.

Tip #2: Actually Delete Files

The Mac responsiveness is boosted with the help of more free disk space. A deletion actually does not truly delete files. The free space occupied by these files exist till the space is overwritten. The tips for the creation of more free spaces on the Mac HDD is done, following the tips to delete the files actually by:

Disk Utility is launched

The Finder is used for emptying the Trash

The computer hard drive is selected

The Erase tab is selected

Erase free space button is pressed

The dialog box which appears will allow the user to choose from the Fastest and the Most Secure options, with the help of the sliding scale, writing over the unused space. The Fastest is chosen for a simple type of overwriting free space

Erase free space is clicked

Tip #3: Safari

There has been improvements in the way the Safari browser in Mac handles memory and also the Flash video is not run without being requested by the user. However, there are performance issues when the multiple browser windows and tabs are opened.

One solution for this, can be in the form of the installation of the Memory Clean, showing active memory on Mac. This will ensure the reclaim of unused memory.

The Safari performance guides suggest that the user need to reset the Safari, by emptying the cache and resetting the Safari. The favicons and the preferences are erased. The plug-ins are disabled.

With a lagging performance of the Safari, the best option is to quit and the app is re-launched. Twitter and Facebook, which are memory hoggers are not to be run in the background.

Tip #4: Finder Files Review Are Disabled

A thumbnail preview of the file has to be generated from the list displayed in the Finder Window on the Mac.

Tip #5: Checking Activity Monitor

The Activity Monitor can help to view CPU Usage and allocated memory for the Mac. There are various views that are seen, with the tabs on top, for finding the cause of the Mac slowdown.

Tip #6: Closure of Apps

Considerable memory can be saved from the closure of the apps, that are not much used.

Tip #7: Updating of Mac and the Apps

Software glitches are the causes for the unwanted lag in the system. The updates of the older software can fix these issues. The Mac can run faster and smoother, with an updated Mac along with the apps.

Tip #8: Restarting

A restart of the system will always resolve most of the speed related issues, after the updating of the Mac and the apps is performed. A good restart always resolves the issue of clogging of the memory.

If things are not fixed with a restart, then the restart is tried again, by holding down the Command + R keys, during the initial boot up.

This way, the Recovery Mode is launched and Disk Utility can be run, for the repair of permissions outside OS X.

Tip # 9 : Repairing Permissions on Mac

The apps in the Mac are controlled by permissions, so that one app cannot write on another app. These permissions, running in the background can slow down the Mac and generate some errors.

We can use the Disk Utility for repairing these permissions. The steps that are followed are:

The verification time is decided by the size of the drive and what all are installed on the drive. After the verification process is completed, then the results are displayed for the wrong permissions and these can be fixed with the help of:

Repair Permissions

If unable to resolve the issues with the permissions, then the Recovery Mode can be restarted with the Command + R and then Disk Utility is run from there, after a restart.

Tip # 10 : Visual Effects Are Stopped

The responsiveness of the OS X Mavericks are ensured by the animations provided with the OS X. The animations can be turned off by the following:

System Preferences >Dock is clicked > Minimize windows is set using the Genie Effect to Scale Effect > Animate opening applications and Magnification are unchecked

This way of solving the speedup of the Mac can be taken as the last resort.

Some other useful way to increase the speed of Mac can be to remove the login items. This is to avoid the loading of the installed apps, whenever Mac is started, thereby slowing down the Mac. Another way can be the removal of unnecessary apps, consuming valuable hard disk space.

Usually every laptop consists of a single hard drive. The hard drive has a contiguous amount of storage space. Once you start accessing the system you can see the size of the hard disk through the interface. In addition, it shows the space acquired by the system files as well as other application. It also tells you the amount of space that is empty. With the latest trend, you can easily manage your hard drive space. Today, if you purchase a Windows or Mac based systems, you can see a single hard drive volume. However, both Windows and Mac allow you to manage the hard drive space. You can easily partition the hard drive space into multiple volumes. This helps you to manage data more efficiently as you can keep separate categories of data in separate volumes. You can specify the amount of space you want to allocate to each volume. Creating partition on a Mac based system is an extremely easy task. However, you might face certain issues while creating the partition.

Consider a scenario where you are working on a Mac based system running Mountain Lion OS X. Mac OS X uses the Hierarchical File System (HFS) format to store data on the hard drive. Since, Mac comes with a single partition; you decide to make multiple partitions to arrange your data. Mac based systems comes with a Disk Utility, which can be used to create partitions in the system. However, you are not aware of how to work with it. While messing around with the tool to create partitions, you got the following error.

Such kind of error messages is very common in the case of manual partition of the hard drive which might have Bootcamp files earlier. Such a situation denies you to create any partition of the hard drive. Some of the common situations where you could get the ‘partition failed’ error message include the following.

If you are running two OS X and trying to delete a bootcamp partition.

The number of drags and click sequence also accounts for the error.

Some kind of calculation errors could also give you the partition failed error.

However, you can try fixing these partitions related errors by using the file system check command line utility. When you are unable to resize Mac HFS partition, you need to follow the below steps to fix the issues.

Step 1: Reboot the Mac system.

Note: You need to start the Mac in a Single User Mode. This can be done by using the Command + S key while booting.

Step 2: Open the command prompt.

Step 3: Type /sbin/fsck –fy

Step 4: Once the file check is over, type ‘exit’ to complete the process.

Note: You can also type ‘reboot’, if you wish to reboot the system.

This process allows you to fix any kind of errors present in the hard drive, which is not allowing you to create the partition. Once fixed, you can boot the Mac as usual. You can make use of the Disk Utility option to create a partition. You need to follow the below mentioned steps to do that.

Open the Disk Utility.

You can try creating partition by making use of the sliding feature. You can slide the box downwards as required to use the free space.

When you wanted to buy a laptop, what is that you see in it before buying? design? processor capability? technology it uses? or the face of the seller?

In fact, it is statistically proven that 9% of the people who go to a retail shop to buy a laptop by getting convinced by the retailers with some sort of products that gives them best profit. Another statistical fact says that 33% of the people blindly go with the retailer’s choice than their own.

There is a difference between the two lines said above. First line talks about those who wanted to buy a laptop with known configurations but don’t know what to go for and the second line talks about people who wanted to buy a laptop buy don’t know how to choose one. Finally, it says that only 67% are wise enough to buy a laptop to their own wish and requirement.

Buying a laptop isn’t that hard. All you need is an idea of what you wanted in it. Also you need to have an idea of the prices of the products for various hardware configurations. The same product can be tagged at two different prices of $399 and $299 for example. Buying it for lower prices doesn’t make you a clever and the one who bought it for higher price a fool. What matters here is the configuration you bought it for.

Why do you need a laptop?

The only important thing you should consider is ‘necessity’. You would need a tool when there is a work to do with it. So, identify your necessity and assess the software and hardware requirements. The sizes and features can also be considered in your requirements. Choose to buy one that fits your needs which of some are shown below.

For All purpose

If you want to buy a laptop for everyday tasks, you can consider buying a 15 inch laptop that can easily be carried around everywhere. You may also choose to buy a 11 or 13 inch light weight laptop with moderate configuration that fits to accomplish your daily tasks. Depending on the gaming and graphics you need, laptops defer in costs and performance.

The ideal configuration for all purpose laptops without much gaming and graphics is:

For Business

If you want to buy a laptop that can process your business tasks like creating and editing documents, spreadsheets and presentations, you need a laptop with good keyboard, durable design and sharp screen. A business laptop should also be slim and light weighted in design that can fit in the bag you carry around documents with in.

Try to buy one with strong keyboard as you can’t drag out the external keyboard from your bag every time and everywhere.

For Gaming

If you want to buy a laptop that supports high-end gaming, you should opt for one with equally high-end configuration. You need discrete graphics, a high resolution anti-glare screen and powerful speakers on the go. For more best gaming experience, you may have to spend more on configuration.

For Multimedia Work

If you wanted a laptop to edit multimedia content like photos, videos and graphical illustrations, you need a laptop with powerful processor, discrete graphics, solid SSD hard drive and a full HD high resolution display. Moreover, prepare to spend for the best required configuration as it may cost a bit higher than you expected.

The SSD type of hard disk constitutes the 25% of the price of the laptop as it is the latest technology that allows faster data reading and writing speeds.

For Kids/Internet Usage

If you want to buy a laptop for internet browsing or for kids, you can go with low cost laptop like Chromebook that runs on Google browser centric OS. You may also find a laptop with Windows around $35 instead.

You may choose your own configuration in buying a laptop. The intention of writing this article is to help you not to put your laptop buying decision in the hands of a seller. Hope this article gave you some idea about laptop types and their configurations.

Please like & share this article to your friends and help them buying a laptop with best configuration for their needs.

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